The assassination of Martin Luther King, 40 years ago today, was an event of singular importance, silencing one of the century's most profound and influential advocates for nonviolent change. But all too often what gets lost in the commemoration of King's death is the violence it unleashed around the country. It takes nothing away from King's greatness to suggest that when we look to that April day for historical import, we do a disservice by not going further to examine the broader consequences of James Earl Ray's gunshot.
In only the strictest sense was King's death the cause of the riots. In Baltimore, Washington, Kansas City and elsewhere, frustrations had been building for years. De facto segregation, workplace discrimination, police brutality and immense poverty were the inescapable realities of ghetto life, and they chafed against the postwar national rhetoric of consensus and progress. By the mid-1960s, ghettos around the country were tinderboxes, going off at the slightest provocation. And King's assassination was the greatest provocation possible.
Over the course of the following week, riots broke out in 125 cities nationwide. In many instances the National Guard was required to quell the violence. In Washington, Chicago and Baltimore, it took tens of thousands of regular army soldiers and Marines. When they were over, some 39 people were dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested. The damages were estimated at $65m - about $385m today.
But the real damage was rendered over a much longer term. First was the physical destruction. The riots literally burned out the centres of major American cities, and in their aftermath few investors, insurance companies or businesspeople were willing to return. Dozens of inner cities, already under strain from the suburbs, simply collapsed, leaving in their wake a miasma of unemployment, crime and poverty.
To be sure, there had been riots before - Watts, Newark, Detroit, among others. But as late as fall 1967, the majority of Americans told pollsters that they didn't believe a riot could happen in their city. After April 1968, no one could hold that illusion any longer.
The riots thus provided an entrée for conservatives to finally, fully assert law and order as a national political issue. Something that had been brewing for decades at the local level, and which had played a role in the GOP victories of 1966, became after April 1968 the single most important domestic concern in the 1968 presidential race. Polls repeatedly put it at par with, and even above, the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon, who had largely avoided talking about riots and civil rights before April, now made law and order - and the revulsion of white suburbia against the violent images of rioters reacting to King's death - a central theme in his campaign.
The riots also vaulted Nixon's eventual running mate, the obscure Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, to national prominence. In the wake of the violence in Baltimore, Agnew had called local civil rights leaders to a meeting and then ambushed them with accusations that they had facilitated the racial militancy that he - and much of white America - believed to be the cause of the riots. Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan clipped a news story about the speech and handed it to his boss. And while Nixon toyed with other running mates, he ultimately chose Agnew based on his newfound fame as the standard-bearer of the "silent majority". Agnew was consistently marked for his boorishness by the press corps, but, as an astute Time magazine columnist wrote: "What Agnew has got is a reflexive feel for how millions of fellow Americans view the world - many of them through suburban windows."
Whether or not Agnew made the difference that November, his selection defined the new White House as a decided turn in American politics, one that pivoted heavily on the riots. Along with the growing appeal of law and order as a political attitude came a rejection of the liberal state and its ameliorationist, integrationist attitude toward the inner-city poor. Conservatives drew a direct line connecting ghetto unrest and liberal social policy, an accusation that also appealed to the pocketbooks of a new generation of middle-class, suburban whites.
Whereas the liberal state portrayed the ghetto as something to integrate into the rest of society, the riots gave impetus to a new domestic militarism that saw the ghetto as an alien entity within American borders, a cancer that had to be isolated from the rest of the body public. In the wake of the riots suburban gun purchases skyrocketed, and Nixon, through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, funnelled money to police departments to buy exotic anti-riot weaponry: body armour, tear gas, even surplus tanks. By the early 1970s an anti-riot urban infrastructure was in place, one that psychologically, bureaucratically and even physically severed the ghetto from the rest of the city, and the city in turn from the suburbs.
Even elements of the integrationist liberal state became transmuted into tools in isolating the ghetto. Rejecting the employment-and-education focus of the Great Society, city, state and federal agencies greatly expanded income supports and other welfare programmes, often as the result of pressure from activist groups who subtly - and sometimes not so subtly - threatened renewed mob violence otherwise.
In his 1973 State of the Union, Nixon declared: "America is no longer coming apart - the hour of urban crisis has passed." Of course, it was only getting worse in the inner city. But the ebbing of the "riot era" left a thick ring of contempt toward the inner city. He and subsequent presidents used that revulsion to power cuts in housing supports, small-business loans, funds for inner-city schools and job training.
Today the hour of urban crisis continues in dozens of American cities. It did not begin the night King was killed. But the long echo of the riots that followed is a critical reason why America abandoned any effort to end it.
Clay Risen's book, A Nation in Flames: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, will be published in spring 2009